Chronicles of Canada Volume 31 - All Afloat: A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways

Canada was born on the water. Before railways crossed the continent or roads carved through wilderness, the rivers and lakes, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes defined what Canada could become. This volume of the Chronicles of Canada traces that liquid inheritance from the kayaks and birchbark canoes that Indigenous peoples mastered millennia before European arrival, through the age of sail that carried Canadian vessels to every corner of the globe, to the steamers that lit up Canadian enterprise and the fisheries that Lord Bacon himself called 'richer treasures than the mines of Mexico and of Peru.' William Wood weaves a narrative of commerce, ambition, and national identity played out on Canadian waters, culminating in the Navy that guards those same waterways today. For anyone who has ever stood on a Canadian shore and wondered what stories the water could tell, this chronicle answers with vivid particularity.